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The eighteenth century was a particularly interesting and exciting period in the history of English literature. This was when the modern world – i.e. our world – began to take shape. This was when many phenomena such as journalism as we know it and the novel came into being and immediately found a mass readership. What happened in English literature at the time was quite extraordinary. Due to special historical, cultural und social conditions, literature could develop in ways that would have been unthinkable on the continent.
This series of lectures covers a wide range of texts and topics such as the rise of the novel (and its various shapes and forms such as texts imitating travel literature; epistolary, erotic, experimental and Gothic novels), other prose texts (travel literature, diaries and autobiographies such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s description of her experiences in Turkey, James Boswell’s outrageously honest diaries and the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave), poetry (for instance Alexander Pope’s elegant and polished pieces on topics such as the stupidity of other authors, Christopher Smart’s gloriously mad celebrations of his cat Geoffrey and, on a more serious note, poems by female authors addressing the issue of gender roles and womens’ rights) and drama (including musical drama).
English literature is more than Literature produced in England; this is why particular attention will be paid to important authors from Scotland and their texts – you will get acquainted with James Macpherson, a literary forger who pretended he had found the works of an ancient bard called Ossian (a Scottish equivalent of, say, Homer), but also Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns who both highlighted the Scottishness of their texts by using elements of Scots rather than standard English. We shall also consider the very close links between literature and the visual arts as well as literature and music. Both William Hogarth’s elaborate early comic strips/graphic novels, the enormously successful Beggar’s Opera which was set in London’s criminal underworld and George Frederic Handel’s English Oratorios will be discussed. This means that there will also be lots to see and quite a bit to hear in this introduction to eighteenth-century English literature.
There will be a final exam (Klausur). |
